Needless Tests

June 14, 1985|The Morning Call

To the Editor:

Throughout history, man has been passing on the ruthless exploitation of animals through scientific experimentation. Through cultural conditioning, man has learned to regard animals as "tools," beings incapable of suffering from physical or psychological tortures.

Year after year, billions of our tax dollars are dished out to fund these brutal procedures, of which many are unnecessary, trivial and redundant. Animal research has been of relatively little help in the fight against cancer, heart disease, diabetes and arthritis, to name a few. Another problem is that the results of these experiments can never be applied to human beings due tothe fact that the biological systems of animals differ greatly from those of humans. Even worse, 50-60 percent of these experiments have absolutely nothing to do with biomedical research.

Example: (From the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine.) The purpose of this experiment was to find out if dogs would recover from frostbite if their nerves were cut first. After cutting the nerve connection to the legs of 10 dogs, the dogs' legs were then frozen. When the frozen legs of these animals began to thaw, they swelled so much that they burst and, in some cases, fell off. How does this experiment benefit man?

There are alternatives to the use of animals in experimentation; tissue cultures, bacteria cultures and mechanical models for example. This is the type of cultural conditioning we should be passing on to the next generation.